three

REFORMATION AND
INCORPORATION, 1500–1558

‘Sore Decay’

The first half of the sixteenth century was a period of enormous change for Boston, even more than for most other English towns. The Reformation, introduced in the latter years of Henry VIII’s reign, brought great changes not only to the religious life of the town but to the secular world as well. It prompted the leading members of the community to seek – and obtain – independent corporate status for the town, after more than 450 years of manorial rule. The background for these developments, however, was continuing economic decline (particularly the gradual disappearance from the 1520s of what little still remained of the port’s international trade), continuing population decline, and increasing numbers of houses standing empty and being demolished.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, wool was still the port’s chief export and the level of wool exports in the 1480s and 1490s were generally better than those of the 1460s and 1470s. During Henry VII’s reign (1485–1509) about 1,000 sacks were shipped out every year and the annual customs duties on wool shipped through Boston averaged a little over £2,500. In around 1489–90, when almost 2,400 sacks were shipped, they reached £4,675 19s 9d and Boston was once again briefly second only to London. During the first few years of the new century exports were again often well over 1,000 sacks, and in 1502–03 over 2,200 sacks were shipped from the port, but this would never happen again and the last shipment of 1,000 sacks in a year was recorded in 1520–21. During the 1520s, the figures resumed their decline and for the rest of Henry VIII’s reign (1509–47) the average for the wool customs was only about £860. In not one of these twenty-six years did it exceed £1,000 again.¹

The port’s other major export of former times, cloth, was never more than a shadow of earlier days. By the 1480s and 1490s it was not uncommon to have only about 150 to 200 cloths exported in a year, compared with well over 1,000 in most years in the 1420s and 1430s. By the time of Henry VIII’s accession, very few cloths were being exported at all from the port. During his reign, the number exported by English merchants varied; a high of sixty-two in 1533–4 came ten years after a total of just two in 1522–23. The quantities exported by foreigners were no better, however; they never exceeded the sixty-one exported in 1517–18, and in 1521–22 just half a cloth was exported. The last Hanse export of cloth from the town was in 1501–02. By the early sixteenth century almost all the cloth exported from the midland counties was being shipped either through London to the Low Countries or from Southampton to the Mediterranean. Salted herrings appear to have remained an important import throughout these years, but the once important trade in imported furs and in Flemish cloth had long disappeared. Wine continued to be imported throughout the century, and enjoyed a little boom in the 1530s when 120 tuns a year were being imported, but the quantities were negligible compared with those being brought in to London, Bristol or Southampton, and far less than had been imported at Boston in the early fourteenth century.²

When John Leland visited the town in about 1538–9 he described it as ‘sore decayed’ and recounted how a local gentleman had told him that the town ‘of old tyme’ had once boasted ‘the great famous fair’ but ‘scant syns it ever came to the old glory and riches that it had’. In those far-off days the town had been, he was told, ‘many fold richer than it is now’. The Hansa steelyard, Leland particularly noted, ‘is little or nothing at alle occupied’. There can be no doubt that in almost every respect the town’s trade was much less than it had once been, and since the 1520s the decline had probably been sharper than ever. However, this picture of decline and decay can be overstated. Leland also noticed that in the harbour there were, ‘dyverse good shipps, and other vessells ryde there’, and we know that at the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign in 1558, there were still four quays in operation at the port and probably a quite prosperous coastal trade, especially in coal and corn.³

The silting of the Haven continued to be a problem but ships could reach the quays at high tide, and the Haven was improved between 1499 and 1500 by the building of new sluice gates by Matthew Hake, an expert in river improvements brought over from Gravelines, near Calais. Moreover, after its creation in 1545, the new corporation made the maintenance of The Haven one of its highest priorities and throughout the sixteenth century the commissioners of sewers ensured that the River Witham remained navigable as far as Lincoln, by insisting on the removal of any blockages and impediments, such as piles of wood, stakes, nets and reeds. This would help ensure that the port could continue to play an important local and regional role, serving a prosperous hinterland.⁴

The fall in the town’s population during the fifteenth century seems, however, to have continued throughout the first half of the sixteenth century too. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Boston had grown steadily through immigration from the surrounding countryside and nearby towns, and sometimes from further afield, as opportunities for profit-making and for work brought in both rich and poor. By the 1550s, however, the town had probably been steadily shrinking for about 150 years, as those same opportunities had gradually disappeared. In 1563 a diocesan survey carried out on the instructions of the Bishop of Lincoln found that there were just 471 households in the town. This would suggest a total population of not more than about 2,000 people, or a little more if there had been some under-enumeration, as sometimes occurred in such surveys. In other words, Boston was now less than half the size it had been in the 1370s, when the Poll Tax returns for the town had suggested a population of about 5,500. Ironically, however, Boston was probably also the largest town in the county by the time of Elizabeth’s accession, as Lincoln would seem to have shrunk even more than Boston had, and in the diocesan survey five years later the old county town could report a population of only 459 households.⁵

As the town shrank and its trade declined, so the number of wealthy families to be found in the town also diminished; but they did not disappear altogether. The completion of the great tower of St Botolph’s around 1510–1520 is itself evidence for this, as are some of the wills of the 1520s and 1530s discussed later in this chapter. Moreover, in 1527 ten Boston men were assessed as having £50 or more of moveable wealth, whereas in Grimsby only one man came into this category. In terms of income per head Boston was still at this period a wealthy town, and with Lincoln still contributed two-thirds of the county’s urban tax payment. When Leland visited he recorded that although there was evidence of ‘sore decay’, and the town was much smaller than it had once been, there were also still plenty of signs of prosperity. On the west side of the town, he noted, ‘all the buildings … are fayre, and merchants dwelle in it’.⁶

Boston remained the largest port in the county in the mid-sixteenth century, an important regional port serving the needs of a wide area, importing a wide variety of items but in small quantities. It handled much more trade than Grimsby, whose haven suffered even more severe silting. Professor Carus-Wilson described the role of Boston in 1500 as ‘more modest than it had once been, but though … outside the main stream of England’s international trade, [its] hinterland was still prosperous and productive … and a potential market for a great variety of imports’. Her words also apply to the town fifty years later.⁷

St Botolph’s church from the north-west, around 1850. The last stage of the tower, the Octagon, was completed between 1510 and 1520. The master-mason was probably John Tempas, who also supervised the last stages of the building of the spire for St James’ church in Louth in 1515.

Pre-Reformation Piety

The ‘sore decay’ Leland found was long established, but a much more sudden and recent change was also occurring in the 1530s, of which he says rather less. By 1538–39 many of the religious values and beliefs which the people of Boston had held for many centuries were being challenged and would soon be swept away. At the end of the sixteenth century Boston was a profoundly Protestant town, with a very Protestant corporation, but in the early 1530s, when the Henrician Reformation was already beginning, there could be little doubt as to the loyalty and devotion of the great majority of the population to the ‘Old Religion’, with its friaries, its guilds, its chantries, its saints, its relics and its indulgences, and this can be demonstrated very clearly by an examination of the wills left by the town’s inhabitants in the1520s and 1530s.

In one will after another we find bequests to the parish church, to nearby village churches, to the guilds and to the friaries, with many detailed instructions included regarding the funeral arrangements and the prayers to be said for the soul of the deceased. The enthusiasm of so many inhabitants for their traditional religious institutions is very striking. In the country as a whole in the 1520s the reputations of both guilds and friaries were coming under attack, but there is no evidence of any falling off in the support for them among the people of Boston.

The numerous generous bequests to the major guilds help explain why some of the guilds were so wealthy by this time. In February 1523, George Howson willed that if his son died without heirs, the house in which he then lived should ‘remayn to the gyld of Sanct Peter with in the parish church of St Botulphe of Boston’. In August 1527 a very wealthy Boston mercer, John Leek, left to the Corpus Christi Guild ‘my lande in Leke and Leverton, and two garthyns lying in Boston upon the west syde off the water or havyn, and £16 in mony, for the terme off four score and twelve yerys …’ St Peter’s Guild would also receive his vestments, for the use of the aldermen, and ‘my standing cuppe off sylver and gylte with the coveryng’. Most importantly, and in return for an additional annual payment of 13s 4d, the Corpus Christi guild was also entrusted to ‘kepe an obbyt … yerly for my soule, my wyffes soulys, for the soulys off my father and mother and all christen soulys’. In return for his obit, Joseph Benson of Boston, a merchant of the Staple at Calais, in 1526 gave back to the Guild of Corpus Christi a number of tenements he had once bought from the guild, and John Robinson’s gifts of land in Skirbeck to St Mary’s Guild in 1525 were so extensive that they came to be known as ‘John Robinson’s lands’. In his will, another wealthy Boston burgess, Thomas Murre, who owned a ropeworks, asked that he should ‘be mayd a brother in Corpus Christi gylde after my beryall, in paying my dewtes as the custome of the gylde is’, and that the guild would perform ‘suche a obbyt for my soule and all crysten soulys as the sayd alderman and cobrether and my executors may a gre uppon’. In return for this privilege he presented, ‘my three housys and my lyttyll grene, callyd my layng place, to the alderman, chamberlanes and cobrether of Corpus Cristi gylde for the terme of four score years and twelve, and for ever, iff it may be sufferyd by the lawe.’ Other sums were in addition sometimes left to pay for further prayers to be said for the deceased’s soul, in the hope of speeding the soul’s passage through the pains of purgatory. John Leek, for instance, left further sums to pay for priests to say prayers for his soul both at Lincoln Cathedral and at the church at Leverton, and Thomas Murre left small weekly sums to be paid to the bedesmen of St Mary’s Guild to say prayers for his soul for ‘a yere lasting after my decease’.⁸

Men like Leek, Murre and Robinson were among the town’s wealthiest inhabitants, but such attachment to the guilds was not confined to the rich. In 1529, Richard Quykrell contributed ‘8d to the Appostyll gylde in the churche of Boston for amending of areymentes’, and another ‘widow’s mite’ was presented the following year by William Malteby, who left just 6d to the Seven Martyrs’ Guild. Robert Whytte, the innkeeper-tenant at the White Hart tavern, could afford to give rather more; in October 1527 he left 3s 4d ‘to the gild of the blessed Mary of Boston’.⁹

Although the larger bequests were usually made to the guilds, there were also many who made gifts to the friaries, which were clearly held in high esteem in the town in the 1520s. The friaries had always played a central role in the life of the town; all four orders of friars in the town emphasised teaching and preaching, rather than prayer and seclusion, and their houses were often used for secular purposes. The earliest record of the Franciscans in Boston – in 1268 – occurred because twelve tuns of wine were stolen from their convent that year, and their church was said to have staged the Corpus Christi plays in the late fifteenth century. The Dominicans, whose house and church stood in the very centre of the town, attracted large congregations to their Lenten sermons. Relations between the clergy and the friars were sometimes strained, as each saw the other as rivals for adherents and benefactors, and on one occasion, in November 1376 – but no doubt still remembered 150 years later – the Dominicans had armed themselves with swords, bows and arrows and heavy stones, to prevent the Bishop of Lincoln from attending the funeral of a local nobleman who had asked to be buried in their church. The friaries were respected by townspeople, however, precisely because they attracted the support and patronage of wealthy and powerful families like the Spaignes and the Tilneys. Moreover, they were valued also as centres of learning. When Leland visited the town, shortly before their dissolution, he found that they kept most impressive libraries, and he commented particularly favourably on that of the Dominicans, one of whose books he took for the king, and which is now in the British Library. The warden of the Franciscans at this time was John Perrot, who had obtained his Doctorate of Divinity at Oxford in 1526. Local people could also be grateful to the Dominicans for their drinking water, for it had been Dominican friars who, 200 years earlier, had paid for the piping of water into Boston, probably from the Hagnaby Brook about five miles out of Boston, and had made this a free gift to the townspeople. The well presumably stood in what is now known as Pump Square.¹⁰

A number of local people in the late 1520s and 1530s asked that they might be buried in one of the friary churches, and left money to the friaries for the saying of their obits. Robert Rydder of Boston, who made his will in January 1529, chose to be interred in the Dominicans’ church and left money for a friar to say Masses for sixty days at the Scala Celi altar in St Mary’s Guild chapel in the parish church, to which generous indulgences had been attached. In 1531, Agnes Howson asked to be buried in the White Friars’ (the Carmelites’) convent, and asked that the friars should ‘syng a trentall (thirty successive days) of massys’ for her soul. In return she bequeathed to them 10s plus ‘a mazer of sylver and a brasse pot (and) to the yong frerys of the sayd house a cowe’. In 1532, Edmund Burte also asked to be interred ‘at the Whyte Frerys in Boston within the chapell of our Lady’, and bequeathed to the convent, after the death of his wife and son, his house in Glassing Lane, ‘yff the law will suffer it, and shall kepe yerly on obbyt by note for my soule, my wyffe’s soule and all christen soulys’. He also gave the convent 6s 8d for repair work at their church. As late as 1534, Nicholas Crawthorne also put it in his will that he wished to be buried at the Franciscan friary.

The friars were also often asked to sing at funerals at the parish church. A Boston skinner, Hugh Schawe, left detailed instructions for his service, at the Scala Celi altar, in which the friars would play a prominent part. He requested that:

… the four orders of frerys in Boston, as well as prestes as other of the convent, bring me further to the paryshe churche of St Botulphe in Boston, two and two together to say placebo and dirige with commendacion over the nyght … and in the mornyng … say messe of Scala Celi … every preste of theym to have for hys payn and labor 4d, and every novys and yong frère 1d.

The roper Thomas Murre was also keen to have the friars sing at his funeral, and seems to have paid them rather better for their ‘payn and labor’. In his will of September 1530 he bestowed 3s 4d on each of ‘the four closters in the towne of Boston for goyng before me to the highe churche and for syngyng of dirige’. In addition, he made a gift to the Carmelites of metal dishes and his best spit, plus a half share in the value of his houses standing in the Back Lane next to the friary, the money to be spent on repairs ‘where most need is’. For the wealthy it may almost have been a matter of course to pay the friars to sing at their funerals, and particularly as part of the procession which followed the deceased to the parish church.¹¹

The Guild Chapel of St Mary, 1850; drawn by L.H. Michael.

The wills clearly show the vitality of late medieval religious observance in Boston. In the 1530s there were plenty of people in the town who still believed completely in the efficacy of prayers for the dead and in the mediation of the saints and the Virgin Mary. Typical of many who seem to have been completely oblivious to the changes that were about to come was the widow Agnes Howson, who in 1531 left an altar cloth ‘to our Lady of Pietie of the Whyte Frerys’. ‘The inhabitants of Boston’, comments Dr Cross, ‘seem to have been totally unprepared for the revolutionary religious changes of the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII.’¹²

The Henrician and Edwardian Reformation in Boston

The people of Boston were clearly proud of their great church of St Botolph; of its remarkably high tower (only recently completed), of its wealth, its crosses, its relics, its many altars, each with their expensive altar cloths and wax candles, and of its excellent choir – so good that one of the greatest English musicians of this era, John Taverner, became the choirmaster. Leland described the church as ‘the beste and fayrest of al Lincolnshire, and served so with singing, and that of cunning men, as no paroche in al England’. Unlike older towns such as Lincoln and York, there was only one parish in the town, and only one parish church. For many centuries, therefore, the people of the town had poured their energy and money into the one church, much encouraged by their guilds to do so. When rumours began to circulate in the summer of 1536 that the government was planning to confiscate the wealth of the churches, once it had completed the dissolution of the lesser monasteries (which was already in progress) the horror and indignation of many townspeople was to be expected. Consequently, when news reached the town that the people of Louth, Caistor and Horncastle had risen in rebellion and were planning to march on Lincoln, and perhaps also London, to demand a change in policy and the removal of hated ministers and bishops, there were some in the town who were willing to risk everything to join the rebels.¹³

On Wednesday 4 October 1536, the rebels at Horncastle forced the High Sheriff, Edward Dymoke, to write to the townspeople of Boston, commanding them to go to a muster of all Holland and Kesteven men on Ancaster Heath. Two days later a party of about 2,000 rebels from the Horncastle area arrived in the town to rally support and to demand that the local gentry should take an oath swearing allegiance to the rebels’ aims. By this time the rebellion had already drawn blood. On the Wednesday the Horncastle rebels had seized the Bishop of Lincoln’s chancellor, Dr Raynes, and beaten him to death, and then hanged one of the officials who had been sent in to the county by the hated chief royal advisor, the Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell. The unfortunate official’s fate had been sealed when the Horncastle rebels, whose blood was up having just killed Raynes, had learnt that he shared the same name as another much despised former minister, Thomas Wolsey.¹⁴

Fearing for their property, and probably also for their lives, most of the Boston gentry seem to have done as they were told, but the rebellion deeply divided the townspeople. Some certainly joined the rebels, but others were more cautious and less willing to believe the rumours. Government officials claimed that the inventories they were compiling were purely to make possible a new tax on church property planned by Cromwell, and that the king had no plans to seize the valuables of the Church. After the rebels had left the town, a party of ‘loyalists’ was formed, led by Anthony Irby, the long-serving clerk to the Kesteven justices and, significantly, one of the commissioners employed by Cromwell the year before to carry out a revaluation of ecclesiastical properties in the county. Assistance was sought against the rebels from the loyal Earl of Shrewsbury, who was reported to be assembling a royal army at Nottingham. Irby and a group of about eighty men also rode over to Sleaford, to the home of the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Hussey, to lend him their support against the rebels. When they arrived, however, they found that instead of mustering a force to confront the rebels, Hussey had despaired of such a course and instead fled, disguised as a priest, to the house of a friend in Nottinghamshire.¹⁵

The Boston contingent of rebels marched first to Lincoln, where the Louth and Caistor men had already begun to arrive on the night of Friday 6 October. Acting on the orders of a sheriff’s summons, they saw themselves not as rebels but as loyal subjects who were making a legitimate and lawful protest. Consequently, on the following Wednesday morning, when Dymoke and the other gentlemen who were by now the recognised leaders of the movement urged them to return home, they were amongst the first to do so, and accepted that the gentry would seek the king’s pardon on their behalf. The Boston men would appear to have been among the least militant of those who took part in the rising. However, fears of the king’s reprisals in the days that followed the rising’s collapse led to some villagers near Boston, at Wrangle, Leverton and Leake, ringing the church bells again in the hope of rallying local people to oppose any royal forces which might be sent against them. Although several men from Louth and Horncastle were put to death for their part in the rising, only one man from Boston was hanged, perhaps as a warning to the rest of the townspeople. The brutality of the king’s treatment of the rebels seems to have been effective. As in the other Lincolnshire towns that had participated in the rising, there were no subsequent protests in Boston against further religious changes that followed in the next few years. When the king passed through Lincolnshire in 1541 on his way to York, the townspeople felt it necessary to present him with a substantial peace offering, a gift of £50, which was a larger sum than that offered by any other Lincolnshire town.¹⁶

Following the Lincolnshire Rising, the suppression of the monasteries was continued, and it was clear to many that the friaries would also soon be abolished. As a result, the bequests which had once supported the friaries ceased, and some of the friars left their orders to seek employment elsewhere. By February 1539, when Cromwell’s agent Richard Ingworth arrived to supervise their dissolution, he reported that the friaries of Boston were ‘pore howseys and pore persons with pore implements’. A few weeks earlier the musician John Taverner also wrote to Cromwell, describing how the friars ‘piteously lamented … their poverty, knowing not how to live till their houses be surrendered.’ They had had to sell off their possessions to feed themselves: ‘thyre plate and other implements be sold and the money spent so that there ys nothing left to make sale of now but only leade.’ Taverner hoped that Cromwell would give the friars pensions but this was refused, and before the end of February the four houses had been given to the king and the friars evicted. With no opportunities to find employment in the church in Boston, about forty or more friars had to leave the town to find what work they could, or to live by begging.¹⁷

Many in the town must have regretted the removal of the friars, but even more alarming now was the likely closure of the guilds, with the loss not only of their considerable wealth and property, but also of the very hope of salvation and remission for sins, which was promised by the prayers for the dead in the guild chapels. Moreover, the guilds were important both socially and politically. They had created and maintained the sense of community in the town, and the men who served as aldermen and chamberlains on the incorporated guilds were also the leading men of the town, personally wealthy and often holding positions in the manorial courts which at this time still governed the town. The guilds were threatened because from the 1530s, Protestants had begun attacking the idea of purgatory, and the need for prayers for the dead. Moreover, the sale of indulgences was outlawed under the Ten Articles of 1536 and this was a considerable blow both to the income of the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the town’s richest guild, and to the economy of the town. In 1521–22 the income from the guild’s indulgences reached the enormous sum of £1,550 and it is estimated that approximately 8,000 individual contributions were made that year. By the 1540s the income of the guilds was therefore already in decline; their very purpose was seriously questioned, and it was known that some of Henry’s advisors were beginning to contemplate the wealth that might accrue to the Crown should it choose to nationalise the guilds and seize their lands.

One means of saving the guilds’ properties for the town, it was hoped, would be for the town to obtain from the Crown a charter of incorporation. The new borough would then be able to acquire the guilds’ properties before they were seized by the government. The idea of seeking incorporation may have come first in 1543, and from a surprising source. Following severe storms that year, which had done considerable damage to the county’s sea banks, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk and the king’s brother-in-law, suggested that repairs in the Boston area might be much more successfully carried out if the town came under a single authority, rather than being divided between three feudal lordships. He had recently become the greatest landowner in the county, having been most richly rewarded with monastic lands for his role in suppressing the Lincolnshire Rising, but he also had a particular interest in Boston, because in 1541 he had been given some of the former properties of the town’s friaries.¹⁸

To have so powerful a friend at court was an enormous advantage, but early in 1545 the town had another piece of good luck. The holder of the great Honour of Richmond, Henry, Duke of Richmond (the king’s illegitimate son), died and the vast estates he had owned reverted to the Crown, including the greater part of the town. With the Duke of Suffolk’s support, the town presented its request and was successful. On 14 May 1545, the town received its charter of incorporation. In return for a substantial payment – £1,654 15s 4d – it acquired the lands of the former Honour of Richmond in the town and all other property in Boston held by the king, along with the former holdings of the Knights Hospitallers and the parish church, including the right to appoint the vicar. Two months later, on 12 July 1545, in a ceremony presided over by the new mayor, the new corporation also received the goods and lands of the incorporated guilds.¹⁹

The whole business had been carefully planned. The aldermen and chamberlains of the leading guilds now became the members of the new corporation, with the last alderman of St Mary’s Guild, Nicholas Robertson, appointed the first mayor of the borough, and St Mary’s Guildhall recognised as the new Town Hall. Men who had once enjoyed considerable influence in the town through their membership of the guilds now enjoyed power as members of the new corporation. At this stage many still hoped that the guild chapels might be allowed to survive and that the traditional obsequies and obits would continue. An Act of Parliament was passed in the same year to suppress guilds and guild chapels, but the Boston men could take some comfort that this only applied to those which had already been discredited. However, following the death of Henry VIII in January 1547, and the succession of the Protestant boy-king Edward VI, control of the government passed into the hands of the Protestant Duke of Somerset, who became the Lord Protector. One of the measures introduced into the new Parliament was a wide-ranging Chantries Act, which abolished all guilds and chantries and was passed in November 1547.²⁰

The minutes of the new corporation make no mention of the implementation of this measure, but we know that of the guilds’ eighteen chantry priests and fifteen clerks, only one received a pension from the government; how the rest fared is unknown but few could have found other employment in the Church. Some other changes had been made already. Ten years earlier, in September 1538, Cromwell had ordered the churchwardens to remove the great cross – the rood – that had hung from the chancel arch of St Botolph’s, denouncing it as idolatrous. To the horror, no doubt, of the great majority who saw this spectacle, the cross was taken to the Market Place and burnt. This had been Boston’s contribution to Cromwell’s assault on idolatrous images and shrines carried out that year. In 1538 he had also ordered the destruction of the tomb of St Edmund at Bury, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury and, closer to home, the churchwardens of Louth had also been obliged to remove a large gilded equestrian statue of St George that had long stood in the parish church. In the next year or two the church would also have had to acquire a large chained Bible, again on Cromwell’s orders. Cromwell’s fall from power and execution in 1540 brought a halt to such developments, but with the removal of the guild chapels in 1547–48 Boston, like every other parish church in the country, entered a new era. During the young king’s brief reign (1547–53), the high altar and all the former guild altars had to be removed, together with all statues of the Virgin Mary and the guild’s patron saints, if they had not already been taken down. In 1549 a new English prayer book was introduced with a clear Protestant liturgy. Transubstantiation was now denounced as a papist fiction and the communion service became a simple commemoration of the Last Supper, probably held in the nave. By 1550, almost all remaining traces of Catholicism had been removed, except for the wall paintings, but on 5 June that year the mayor and aldermen met ‘to consider what should be done about the whitening of the church, the high choir and St Peter’s’.²¹

With what enthusiasm they went about their task it is impossible to know, but by this time there can be little doubt that while many townspeople were probably simply resigned to the changes, a minority wholeheartedly welcomed them. A few highly educated and influential Protestants had been living in the town since the 1530s. One of the first was the musician John Taverner, who had probably become a Protestant while serving as the choirmaster at Wolsey’s Cardinal College at Oxford in the late 1520s. He had long had connections with the town, having been master of music at Tattershall College before being recruited by Wolsey to his new college, and in 1530 he was appointed master of music at St Botolph’s and settled permanently in the town. He married a local widow, joined the Corpus Christi Guild in 1537, and acted as its treasurer from 1541 until it was taken over by the new corporation in 1545, at which point he was appointed one of the first aldermen. He was a man of considerable influence who Cromwell clearly trusted as a ‘safe pair of hands’. In 1538 he had been entrusted by Cromwell with the highly contentious and potentially dangerous task of supervising the removal of the great cross from the church and its public burning. His opportunity to exert more influence, as a member of the corporation, was cut short by his early death in 1545.

A Protestant friend of Taverner, who also settled briefly in the town in about 1538, was Thomas Garret. Taverner and Garret had met at Cardinal College, and it may have been Garret who had introduced Taverner to Protestantism. He is known to have created a Protestant cell in the college, and to have brought into the college from London a copy of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, together with numerous works by Luther. Perhaps on Taverner’s recommendation, he became a member of St Mary’s Guild and was made master of the grammar school, which was largely paid for by the guild. By 1540, however, he had left the town and returned to London, where, in the same year, his outspoken Protestant views led to his arrest and execution.

Another possible agent for change in the town was John Foxe, whose book History of the Acts and Monuments of the Church (better known as The Book of Martyrs), tracing the lives and sufferings of Protestants who died for their faith, would later become one of the most important weapons of Protestant propaganda. Foxe was born in the town in 1516 and was another who converted to Protestantism while at Oxford; probably before 1538, when he took his degree as Bachelor of Divinity. He seems to have returned to the town, at least intermittently, for many years after this, and particularly from 1545 onwards, when his Protestant views forced him to resign his position as a fellow of Magdalen College. In 1550, when he was ordained, he was reported to be living at Eresby Hall, near Spilsby, in the household of the Protestant Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, the extremely wealthy widow of the late Duke Charles Brandon, whose influence was probably also felt in the town in the 1540s.²²

John Foxe, 1516–1587.

It was also not at all uncommon to find early converts to Protestantism among the more educated clergy and the friars, who were renowned for their intelligence and learning, and who often found themselves strongly drawn to a Bible-based Christianity, and shared some of Luther’s criticisms of the Church. When asked to arrange the removal of the cross in 1538, Taverner was able to find support among the friars, one of whom preached a sermon against idolatry during the cross-burning ceremony in the Market Place. Taverner wrote to Cromwell afterwards to tell him that the friar’s sermon ‘hath done much good and hath turned many men’s hearts’.²³

John Foxe’s birthplace – in the Market Place – as it appeared in 1799, when it was the Bell Inn.

Taverner may have exaggerated the impact of the friar’s sermon, and he was probably simply relieved that the event had not led to a riot, but it would seem that ‘many men’s hearts’ were ‘turned’ in the next dozen or so years, for in spite of the return to Rome under Mary I (1553–58) and the reversal of many of the changes introduced in her brother’s reign, the reintroduction of Protestantism under Elizabeth I seems to have been widely accepted, and in November 1561 the corporation chose to appoint as vicar of St Botolph’s a very Protestant incumbent, one of the first of many in the town who would later be generally known as Puritans.

A number of factors seem to have smoothed the transition from the ‘Old Religion’ to the new during the late 1530s, 1540s and 1550s. After the treatment of those who had played a leading part in the Lincolnshire Rising, and the subsequent Pilgrimage of Grace in Yorkshire, sheer fear of royal retribution must have been a factor, at least while Henry VIII lived, but for the wealthier and more powerful members of the town the Reformation was also closely associated with the establishment – by royal charter – of an independent corporation, on which they could serve and enjoy real local power. To quote from Claire Cross again, ‘the incorporation of Boston in 1545 meant that from henceforth the leading men of the town had an entrenched interest in the status quo’. Moreover, as she also notes, there could be little or no clerical resistance to the changes because the dissolution of the friaries, guilds and chantries had led to an exodus of about seventy priests. In Elizabeth I’s reign there would be only four men of Boston in holy orders: the vicar of the parish church, the mayor’s chaplain, the Grammar School master and his usher.²⁴

The Bell Inn as it appears today; still an inn, but now the Stump & Candle, and much altered.

The Tudor vicarage, built in the 1480s, on the north side of the church. It remained the vicarage until 1751 and was not demolished until 1850.

The Free Borough of Boston

By the charter of 1545 Boston was given a governing body of a mayor, twelve aldermen, and eighteen common councillors. It had already been agreed by the leading members and officers of the guilds that they would choose the mayor and aldermen from among their own ranks, and the charter in turn gave the mayor and aldermen the power to choose the eighteen common councillors, and also a recorder and town clerk. From now on, and for almost 300 years, Boston would be ruled by this self-appointing oligarchy, known at first as the Assembly. The aldermen and councillors held office for life and vacancies were filled, as they occurred, by the Assembly. A new mayor was elected by the aldermen and common councillors every Lady Day (25 March) from among the ranks of the aldermen, and he took his oath in the Guildhall, before the outgoing mayor and the other members of the Assembly on 1 May.

The mayor and four aldermen also became Justices of the Peace, assisted by the recorder and town clerk, and their court at first sat twice weekly. They had all the powers of county justices, holding quarter sessions, but all records of the court from 1545 to 1728 have been lost. In October 1552 it was agreed by the council that it should convert the kitchen under the Town Hall into a prison, for holding those arrested and awaiting their appearance before the court.

As a free borough, the town now also had the right to send two representatives to Parliament, and did so for the first time in 1552. The freeholders, however, were not consulted as the Assembly took it upon itself to choose the town’s MPs. In 1552, and in most subsequent parliaments during Mary’s reign, the town was represented by its town clerk, George Forster, and by a local gentleman, Sir Leonard Irby, the son of Anthony Irby, both of whom commended themselves to the Assembly by their willingness to meet their own expenses for attendance.²⁵

The common seal, which was attached to all official documents, leases and bylaws issued by the corporation.

As well as two weekly markets, held on Wednesday and Saturday, the charter also gave the town the right to hold two three-day fairs, beginning on St George’s Day and St James’ Day respectively. As clerk of the market, the mayor had the power to fix prices and to preside over the market court, known as the ‘court of piepowder’, settling any disputes which might arise. The ‘piepowder’ court records are also lost, but the Assembly minutes record a number of occasions when tradesmen had to appear before the mayor to be told the prices they could charge. On 28 May 1552, for instance, they record:

All beer and ale brewers present. The beer brewers ordered not to sell double beer above 2d the gallon, or single beer above 1d the gallon until a new assize is sett.

Likewise, the ale brewers not to sell ‘good ale’ above 2d the gallon, or small ale at less than 3 gallons for 1d.

On 23 January 1555, the minutes report that a fishmonger from Lincoln, known as ‘Old Kamock’, was fined 2s for ‘two cades (barrels) of herrings which he bought before the price was set’.

Only freemen of the borough – those who had paid the 20s fee – could trade in the town, and rules were soon introduced to try to stop shipmasters selling their goods ‘on the water’ before the sale could be controlled and supervised. Tolls were collected by two ‘Serjeants of the Mace’, who were given special livery and paid 26s 8d per year. A water bailiff and beadle were also appointed from 1545 to implement and enforce the corporation’s decisions.²⁶

In one important respect the newly established corporation suffered a major financial blow. On 4 March 1551 it was informed by Edward VI’s council that it must surrender the properties and possessions of the former Corpus Christi Guild as the king had decided to grant them to the Lord Admiral, Lord Clinton. Worse was then to follow. Three months later, on 21 June, it was also ordered to surrender the former properties of the four other major guilds, including St Mary’s Guildhall, where the Assembly was meeting. The Earl of Warwick, who had recently seized control of the government from the Duke of Somerset, needed these properties, it would seem, to reward William Parr, the Marquis of Northampton, for his loyalty. When the Assembly met that morning to consider the demand, their first reaction was to reject it, by a vote of nineteen to four, but, perhaps after discussions with their legal advisor, the recorder Richard Gooddyng and the town clerk George Forster, they changed their minds. When they met again in the afternoon the Assembly minutes record that although ‘most hath thought convenient that they sholde seale no release for the said gild lands yet nevertheless (for avoiding of further daunger) they thynke and do holly agree (that upon certain condicions) they will make a release or surrender’. Parr subsequently agreed that the corporation could continue to use the Guildhall and waived his rights to the ‘goods and chattels’ of the former guilds, but the loss of land and property was considerable, and most of it was lost forever. On the accession of Queen Mary just a year later however, Parr was arrested for his support for Lady Jane Grey, all his lands were seized by the Crown and he was sent to the Tower of London. The corporation immediately sought to regain its lands and, after nearly two years of pressing its claim and a payment of £100, succeeded in regaining about a quarter of what was lost.²⁷